The latest insights and advice to keep your company protected from insider threats and breaches.

Authors: Roman Blachman, Yaron Zinar.We recently reviewed a customer’s network and found that 85%(!) of all users in the network had some unnecessary administrative privilege. The excessive privilege stemmed from an indirect inclusion in a protected admin group. Most Active Directory audit systems easily alert on excessive privileges, but will often miss users who have elevated domain privileges directly through domain discretionary access control list (DACL) configuration. We refer to these users as stealthy admins.

This past March we announced Preempt Inspector, a free app for password strength assessment. The App provided administrators with a better understanding of their AD configuration, especially difficult to estimate parameters, such as duplicate and weak passwords. We analyzed the anonymous data we received from the app, and found some worrying trends, like that 1 in 5 enterprise passwords can be easily compromised.